A helmet sensor that detects concussion-strength hits was the main attraction for a Calgary firm’s product launch this weekend. And an ex-felon sports mogul was the big-name draw.

Bruce McNall, former owner of football’s Toronto Argonauts and hockey’s L.A. Kings — jailed for 57 months after pleading guilty in 1994 to defrauding financial institutions out of US$236 million — came out Saturday as the celebrity pitchman for Safebrain.

The Safebrain is a bottle-cap-sized device that blinks if a bodycheck or crash to the head is hard enough, and collects for doctors data of the impact’s force, duration and angle.

Safebrain Systems Inc. has been testing its device with minor-league and amateur hockey squads. With sports-related brain injury a leading concern at pro levels and in youth sports, the Calgary-based company has chosen to begin selling individual units at sports stores later this year instead of marketing team kits.

“I’m here because being in both football and hockey in my life, concussion’s a major, major problem,” McNall said in an interview in the parking lot of the Italian restaurant in Kensington that hosted the media event.

“And it’s not being addressed properly in my opinion, not to mention with youth ... concussions are such a big deal today, and this product these guys developed is solving that problem.

“It’s to help monitor it in a way that friends of mine like Sidney Crosby are not going to suffer what they went through.”

A succession of hits to the head in 2011 kept Crosby, the Pittsburgh Penguins captain, out for several dozen games and the Stanley Cup playoffs that year. McNall explained that the player’s agent used to work with him and recalled having dinner with him when Crosby was a teenager.

McNall has been out of jail since 2001 after getting his sentence reduced 13 by months for good behaviour. He has a film financing company, and began investing with Safebrain after his stepson joined the company’s board.

Safebrain CEO Mike Scott said he weighed McNall’s controversial past before holding the media launch with the former owner as a leading act. He’s taking cues from hockey’s Great One.

“High-calibre guys remained his friend through it,” Scott said. “Wayne Gretzky talks very high of Bruce McNall — that tells me he’s got some integrity.

“He made a mistake in life and there isn’t a person in life that doesn’t deserve a second chance to move forward.”

In fact, Scott boasted, McNall was text messaging with former Kings centre Gretzky just one night earlier.

McNall has the “best phone book in the industry,” and should help “pull the star card” for Safebrain’s launch in Los Angeles later this year.

It’s not the only product of its kind. Two other Ontario-based companies already sell the Shockbox and Impact-alert helmet sensors in sporting goods stores.

Safebrain, after being tested with various junior hockey squads and a University of Alberta neuropsychologist, will join its competitors on store shelves, to appeal to young players and their concerned moms, promoters said.

“It’s easier for an individual to come and purchase one than for a team to justify $3,000 for it,” said Scott Jacko, vice-president of business and development.

When the gadget was recently tested with Arizona State University’s hockey players, Safebrain’s G-force sensor correctly alerted coaches to the team’s lone concussion, he said.

“If Johnny got hit at 10:03, took a 30-G shot to the side of the head that lasted seven or eight milliseconds, maybe the doctors will probably have a better way of diagnosing it,” inventor Rod Newlove said.

At first, McNall said his film company A-Mark Entertainment had invested in it. About 20 minutes and a phone call or two later, he said he’s flipped those one-million shares (trading now at 16 cents each) in Safebrain Systems to a California-based charity on whose board he sits.

That charitable group is called ProCon.org, a website that aims offers non-partisan information on controversial issues.

jmarkusoff@calgaryherald.com

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Head-injury detection device launches with former team owner as pitchman

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